Trump unveils first budget with $3.6-trillion spending cut

In addition to putting an enormous strain on the state budget, these funding cuts would negatively affect millions of Californians, including children, seniors, and people with disabilities.

While the budget proposal for national defense increases spending, it falls short of campaign promises for a “historic” hike in military spending amid plans to rebuild the U.S. Navy.

Specifically, Trump’s budget presumes the American economy will expand at a 2.3 percent annual clip in 2017 and gradually improve to three percent annual growth by 2020.

Trump’s balanced-budget goal depends not only on the growth projections but also a variety of accounting gimmicks, including an nearly $600 billion peace dividend from winding down overseas military operations and “double counting” $2.1 trillion in revenue from economic growth – using it to both pay for tax cuts and bring down the deficit.

Many rank-and-file Republicans recoiled from the cuts, however, which would squeeze foreign aid and domestic programs funded annually by Congress by about 10 percent next year and $1.4 trillion over the coming decade.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a bipartisan public policy organization, said the plan relied on “rosy assumptions”, gimmicks and unrealistic cuts.

President Donald Trump’s proposals to slash federal aid to the poor, the sick and people living in rural areas reflect conservatives’ demands for a smaller federal government but target numerous very people who voted for him last November. It can, and likely will, come up with a very different plan.

The President’s first major budget proposal, which assumes the Medicaid savings in the Affordable Health Care Act (AHCA) will be passed, would make $800 billion in cuts to Medicaid over the next decade.

Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program provide insurance to more than 308 thousand Utahns.

“The administration has said that economic growth will pay for their tax cut, and now in this budget, economic growth will pay to lower the deficit, and you can’t have both”, Furman says.

The $603 billion includes funding for nuclear weapons programs at the Department of Energy and other national defense programs as well as the Department of Defense. The budget also includes $2.6 billion to build a border wall. While the drinking facilities operate under the auspices of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the water customers pay for all the operation and maintenance costs, as well as any improvements.

It was meant to fund events that could not be forecast and thus could not be budgeted for (hence the name), and thus is not subject to Budget Control Act caps.

Deborah Weinstein, executive director of the Coalition on Human Needs, an advocacy group representing more than 100 anti-poverty organizations, called on lawmakers to “reject the bleak and unsafe vision in President Trump’s budget”. The budget he proposed today would make unprecedented cuts to public education and after-school programs, undermine higher education affordability, decimate USDA Rural Development funding vital for infrastructure improvements in eastern CT, cut job training funds which are helping to close the skills gap in manufacturing, and most appalling, eliminate thousands of medical research grants at the National Institute of Health aimed at curing a wide range of illness and disease.

The budget proposes a modest increase in military spending.

That would total $1 trillion, the infrastructure spending figure Trump consistently called for during his presidential campaign. The proposal would extend the work requirement to all able-bodied adults.

Although it is not expected to survive on Capitol Hill, the proposal puts numbers on Trump’s vision of a government that radically cuts assistance to lower-income Americans. And that program could end up requiring states to raise their unemployment taxes. Changes in SNAP alone would save $191 billion.

Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., echoed her GOP counterparts on the cuts to agricultural programs in a statement.

A program created to move people receiving Social Security disability payments back into enter the workforce is politically toxic as well.

In the early review of the president’s plan, critics also pointed to proposed cuts to welfare assistance and a shift toward more dollars being awarded through “block grants”, which can allow new flexibility in spending but would also limit future increases in funding. The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) federal block grant supports California’s CalWORKs welfare-to-work program, which provides cash support, child care, and help securing jobs for more than a million very low-income individuals each month, almost 80 percent of them children.